THURSDAY, 8 JULY 2004

      My office worker’s collar turned unselfconsciously

      up…I return home…feeling a slight, confused concern that I may have lost for ever both my umbrella and the dignity of my soul.

      Fernando Pessoa

      A minute after waking, Danny padded into his shower. His mornings were efficient. He dressed in beige cords, a blue shirt that he rubbed at for a bit with an iron that leaked and was only ever tepid, and strapped his black cycle helmet on his wet hair. His leather satchel slung over his shoulder, he lifted his bike off the hook on the garden wall and set off through the smouldering traffic to work.

      Geordie shifted from facing the back of the sofa to facing the room. He farted a slow crescendo and went back to sleep.

      Danny locked his bike in the underground car park and walked through the office courtyard to a side door into his building. Danny worked at Monks & Turner, a Magic Circle law firm. Which meant that his firm was, supposedly, one of the five best in the country. It was certainly one of the biggest. It felt to Danny like just another institution in a long line of places where you got told what to do, and did it. He had attended Ballyglass Nursery, Primary and High School and had done pretty much everything right. He was a gaunt truthful child and his teachers had been surprised, and a little perturbed, when they realized that he wanted to know as much as he could. His mother still rang to tell him that one of his old teachers had been in the office telling her how they kept his essays to read out to their classes. He never got less than an A and as he got older it began to seem more and more important not to. It seemed that every A raised the tightrope he was walking on a little higher, so that his fall would be even greater when it came. And then, suddenly, he was at the other end and in university.

      His school had filled out his application for Cambridge and he’d signed it. He’d decided to choose history for a degree. There was so much of it. He’d gone along and been interviewed by a large Australian woman, covered in cream drapes like a dustsheeted wardrobe, and a neat little ginger Englishman. Danny was accepted, worked, thrived, and as he’d promised his father, applied to law firms for a job after graduation. Monks & Turner was the first interview and when they accepted him, he’d cancelled the others. Two years of law school in Tottenham Court Road, living above a Perfect Fried Chicken takeaway in Turnpike Lane, saw city life settle down on him like smog. He became a first-class Londoner.

      When he arrived at Monks, a grimy Monday in September, he had sat in Corporate, specifically insurance work. His trainer had just moved into the new office they were going to share. Their new name plaques, James Motion and, underneath of course, and slightly smaller, Daniel Williams, had been put up to replace Townsend Hopkins. Townsend was an infamous old boy partner who’d been given the heave-ho for not bringing the work in. The firm constantly restored itself like that. It put Danny in mind of some vast ruminant. The main entrance, painted, polished, was its mouth, the corridors and meeting rooms served as intestines and organs, and the lawyers were like teeth, yellowy-pale, varying in sharpness, and renewable. Like teeth, they varied not only in sharpness but also in purpose, and some would get clients, others retain them. All, though, were grinders. Danny, when he qualified, had joined Litigation, the only seat he’d done which felt like law, and he was now a two-and-a-half-year qualified solicitor-advocate in the Commercial Litigation department specializing in International Arbitration. Danny sometimes thought that the only job worth doing was one which was covered by one word. Plumber. Joiner. Farmer.

      A year ago Danny’d been given his own office, about the size of a garden shed. When his three bookcases and two filing cabinets had initially arrived he’d felt slightly claustrophobic. Now he felt snug. He could reach almost everything in his room from his desk. His computer screen faced the window. He faced the door. His desk had a panelled front on it and Danny had developed the habit of nipping below it, where he kept a duck-down sleeping bag and a cushion embroidered with sunflowers that his sister had made, for a kip either before, during, or after lunch. He would make sure the route to his desk was barricaded by briefcase and recycling box, then slink off his seat, suddenly boneless.

      Danny’s central friend at Monks was Albert Rollson, a Brummie who’d ditched his accent in favour of a mid-Atlantic twang. Rollson was neurotic. His terrors included other people’s illnesses and he would get out of a lift at the next floor if someone in it coughed or sneezed. He’d flinch if someone accidentally came too close or brushed against him in passing, and grimaced if hugged. Which is not to say that he was cold, he simply, proudly, possessed an over-developed sense of propriety. It informed his distrust of Antipodeans. And Americans. And Europeans. And was the reason he worked in law. He was born to its hierarchy, its wheels within wheels, its concurrent bitchings and slobberings, its dog-eat-dog, backstab, leapfrog. And it allowed him to dress like Cary Grant.

      Danny had shared an office with Rollson when they had qualified, two years after arriving at Monks. They had argued relentlessly over plants. Danny’s view was that offices are the ugliest, most sterile places in the world. Everything is synthetic. You see nothing that is actually growing, bar the perceptible fattening of some of the most sedentary lawyers and secretaries. Danny wanted a real plant in the room. He told Rollson that the lack of flora in the workplace was the reason lawyers started office affairs. There was nothing else to look at but people. The obscene clashing decor, the generic tacky prints, the background corporate hum from air conditioning, VDU and photocopier: people looked at each other more closely. Rollson however, perpetually single, quite liked the idea of people looking at him more closely. Plants were there simply to steal more of his oxygen in a city where there was scarcely enough anyway. He was allergic to anything natural. On a school outing to a stables near Dudley, a large grey mare had once licked his face and he’d never recovered. That rough slobbery smothering tongue. The smell of it. He quite liked seeing the countryside from the motorway, the space, its potential, and he’d once bought a David Attenborough series on video, although he hadn’t watched it.

      Danny walked into his corridor. He noted that the doors of Andrew Jackson, departmental senior partner, and Adam Vyse, departmental managing partner, were open. He removed his bag from his shoulder, placed the helmet in it and carried it close to his body. In this way, and by performing two complicated body-spins at just the right moments, he could walk past the partners’ doors without it being immediately apparent that he was just arriving. It was 9.43 a.m.

      Geordie stretched out an arm to the coffee table, encountered the remote control and switched on Trisba. He noticed that he’d drooled on his pillow.

      Danny’s phone was flashing. This always scared him a little. Either it was a message from last night (which meant that somebody had expected him to be there after he’d left) or from this morning (which meant that somebody had expected him to be